Strategic Plan: April-June 2022 Report Card

Looking back at April-June 2022

June brought us to the end of the first quarter in the life of our new five-year strategic plan. Getting out of the blocks and delivering on some prioritised strategic plan actions over the past few months has been a bit of a mixed bag. 

In some areas, we have made some good headway and set ourselves up to continue following a particular course of action that will likely take years to complete. In other areas, we’ve bitten off a little more than we can chew where organisational bandwidth has been our biggest enemy. 

Overall, we have made a decent start and now it is time we take stock of what we’ve achieved this quarter, what is still in the holding bay and do some steering regarding what we’ll focus on this coming quarter. 

Let’s start by celebrating what we have achieved:

• we launched BeaconHQ — a place to collaboratively create, share and evolve our organisational knowledge. We don’t want to overreach here and claim this as a victory, but this is a small step toward building our processes and organisation knowledge base (... with a lifetime of work ahead of us).

• we have established an employee listening strategy to provide opportunities for our team to tell us where we are getting it right and where we need to improve.

• we made the collective decision to prioritise developing our default processes at the ‘component’ level for the time being. So far, we’ve workshopped and agreed upon our approach to developing a project charter.

• we made some basic resources regarding consulting education public (for example, showcasing a handy book we have on hand in our Brisbane office), and provided access to an online consulting training program for those interested in honing their consulting mindset. 

• we have built a template gallery with over 15 consulting templates to support our team in creating visually engaging infographics and slide decks without the fuss of making them from scratch 

• we have refreshed and promoted several existing Operating System (OS) docs (i.e. policies) and found a few others to develop or refresh along the way:

  • our stance on flexible working arrangements, extending this as an option to the entire team under the proviso that requests are documented in collaboration with pod leads

  • a new training and development policy, making it overt that all Beacon team members have access to $2,000 per financial year for attending training and development activities

  • our "How to" guide to access Uprise - our Employee Assistance Program - to ensure everyone can access external support when we need it

  • a new guide for travellers to assist the team when on the road and make explicit the expectations around travel expenses amongst other logistical matters

  • updated our email user guide to give the option for staff to display their pronouns and why this is important 

• we've continued to focus on internal and external communication activities to keep external stakeholders engaged but are also trying to do a better job with internal communication. Our communication activities were disrupted the last quarter due to personnel changes but we are now heading in the right direction

• we’ve developed a calendar of events to keep track of opportunities for the team to connect across our locations. So far, birthdays, work anniversaries, team lunches, and team travel have been added

• we’ve discussed the first principle of our organisational code "clients are the reason we exist" and have queued up our nine remaining principles. Once we finish reviewing the first principle, we’ll move on to principle 2 "teams over individuals"

• we’ve landed on a structure and format of what will be a quarterly networking/information-sharing session to bring together our network of client partners as our way of giving back and building a network of curious and like-minded people who are committed to making a difference 

A couple of things are taking a little longer than expected…

• Scoping and developing an organisation capability framework, parallel to scheduling organisation-wide training in foundational skill/s. The organisation capability framework is still a priority, but our minds have been occupied elsewhere. Additionally, we opted to focus on guiding funds and developing processes on how individuals can access training and development. However, org-wide training is still on the agenda.

• Scoping and establishing a customer experience mechanism — we are progressing a precursor to this task currently. What we've called "consulting guidelines" or "quality management policy/procedure" (i.e. the step-by-step process to project delivery) in the past will be refreshed and brought back to life. This will give us more clarity around how and when to collect customer feedback.

• Establishing rituals to link our work with our vision. It is probably more the case that this item has fallen down our list of priorities. We have one small ritual where we introduce a new project and explain how it contributes to achieving our vision of a "more impactful social purpose sector".

Looking forward to July-September 2022

So, where are we focused from July to September 2022? It's a bit of a no-brainer here. We’ll refocus on the priority actions we couldn't get to in the last quarter and implement the tasks that made their way into the ‘business as usual’ pile. A reduced number of priority actions worth mentioning in July-Sept are:

• Finalise version 1.0 of our organisational capability framework. We are part of the way there though there is much more to do.

• Develop our end-to-end consulting approach.

• Continue to work on documenting our default approaches — creating project boards on monday.com will be finished first.

• Finish refreshing our Operating System docs (e.g. a Slack user guide amongst several others) in line with how we currently practice.

Well, that is all! You’ll hear from us again in early October with our next quarterly strategic plan update.